How to Blow Up a Timeline

I see an analog with Twitter. There will never be a Twitter killer, a Twitter 2.0. There will be successful, Twitter-like things (Threads, Bluesky) but nothing can be like Twitter because the era is gone. (Which is the point of essay, more or less). Something else will happen that will engross us for a while, and I'm curious what it will be (and really wish I could predict it!), but nobody, not even Twitter (just like WoW itself was never a WoW killer), will be another Twitter.

Dichotomies like this are becoming trite in my opinion, even more so because this representation of "cool/not cool" doesn't ring true to my experience on either platform. Who/what falls in line with either category is largely subjective to the subcultures on the platform itself, among other things¹.

> Twitter was the closest we’ve come to bottling oral culture in written form.

This is nice.

1. With the exception of Tumblr, in my experience at least, Tumblr seemed (entertainingly) hostile to the kind of people who probably went on to launch glowing Instagram personas.

Keeping the Chesterton fences in an established organization was something Musk was particularly ill-suited for. While some ossified companies can benefit from new management, things will only get worse if they throw the baby out with the bathwater. Musk's successes started out as greenfield projects that benefited from ignoring how the incumbents did things, but those days are over for him.

Another thing Musk was ill-suited for was being the guy that did the mass layoffs. In the earlier days of Tesla and SpaceX, most talented engineers would at least be intrigued by a job offer from Musk. He had a knack for finding brilliant people who could make his mad schemes a reality. But now he seems to embrace the darker side of his cavalier persona (while also flirting with demagoguery), which has alienated a huge portion of the talent pool that all of his companies rely on.

Hear, hear!

Most internet companies have no deep or useful understanding of how they pioneered their early successes, or how to tackle the widespread growth decline that they are now encountering. Reddit is another fine example of this effect.

I think the one thing Musk achieved in his folie a un is putting Twitter on the observation deck for long enough that this fact became painfully obvious to many.

I think what we're learning - in fact, what we already knew in the days of newsgroups, and IRC - is "if you build it, they will come". And 'it' can be pretty much any medium that removes the potential inconveniences of connecting with other human beings and voicing opinions to them.

There really is no product beyond the people and the content. Google did well to realise this and turn itself into a huge parasite pretty much from day one: search aggregated the product, analytics kept tabs on what it was up to, and ads exploited both of the former.

That's why we will continue to see VC money and modern social media companies throw themselves at the wall like spaghetti and, eventually for most, off the cliff like lemmings.

The current fracture in social media may be the best thing that's ever happened to the internet (a few pennies in the hyperbole jar, sure). Look how much competition we have now in the 'let humans get their opinions and memes to other humans' space: Mastodon, BlueSky, Lemmy, Squabbles, and so on.

Sadly capitalism will once again inevitably demand a winner and we'll be back at whatever Twitter/Reddit 2.0 is but at least there's always hope for the cycle to begin again.

Meta sensed a sentiment shift against twitter based on a some recent questionable moves by Elon, not a blow up.

It’s a good opportunistic move by Meta.

> "Twitter will persist in a deteriorated state, perhaps indefinitely."

Makes sense.

> "However, it's already a pale shadow of what it was at its peak. The cool kids are no longer sitting over in bottle service knocking out banger tweets."

Fun visually evocative analogy, but gossamer. As soon as we try applying it to reality, it falls apart.

> "Instead, the timeline is filled with more and more strangers the bouncer let in to shill their tweetstorms, many of them Twitter Verified accounts who paid the grand fee of $8 a month for the privilege."

What's "the timeline" here? For You? Following? This hides the ball on the fact there's a much simpler concept here that we're already familiar with, algorithmic vs. "true" timeline. In fact, Twitter pre-Musk had this. It's just different bluechecks now.

> "In the past year, so many random meetings I have with one-time Twitter junkies begin with a long sigh and then a question that is more lamentation than anything else: “How did Twitter get so bad?”"

From above: the cool kids aren't in bottle service banging (whatever that means) and they're stuck on the algorithmic timeline.

So far, all social media platforms have come and gone or faded.. or dealt with remaining relevant with the early adopters and majority that eventually arrives.

You can even go back before them to the instant messaging, forums, IRC and BBS years.

Once organizing and connecting on a platform reaches whatever its zenith may be able to contain or not correct, it changes.

There is always a new curve that emerges, the next curve. Where the masses are ready to adopt the next way of Connecting.

As much as I miss the other communities that existed, new ones will come. Heck, one can even have a say in it and build what they need.

Maybe it’s fediverse time. Maybe blockchain contracts will let me license and withdraw license to my content anywhere I publish it.

I didn’t use Twitter for a decade and recently reconnected with it.

Because I remained in a usage of learning from others it was fine to me to just follow others and topics that interest me and avoid following too much news, local, political, populist (on both sides of the spectrum) perspectives.

One of the worst problems of many recommendation systems is that they don’t get definite feedback about what you hate, only about what you like. They have to guess about negative examples but it’s just a guess. Systems like YouTube that show you a large number of links that might attract you look smarter in the short term because they can ride on your ability to choose something, but they can draw very little conclusion about the links you didn’t click on.

People forgot that StumbleUpon was a recommender for web sites that had an interface very similar to TikTok, my YOShInOn smart RSS reader also works like TikTok but it is a pure content-based recommender.

People say that “engagement=outrage”, something that is only about 80% true (my predictive model believes that HN participants like to talk about cars.). In a network like Twitter or Mastodon where people share posts the classic social feed very much amplifies outrage.

If I can actually bear to look at 5000 angry toots I might try training an anti-outrage model. This could be used several ways: (1) at the input of a reader (I just personally don’t want to see it), (2) at the output of the write (I know, and I get the feedback, that YOShInOn is a nicer “person” than I am) or (3) at the heart of a network to suppress the cycle of anger amplification. You don’t even need to get all of it, you just have to reduce the coefficient of transmission as you would for a virus to improve the tone of a a space.

(3) would by far be the most effective but boy would it get pushback from people, whereas I can apply (1) and (2) to myself and nobody knows.

Look closely at an “angry” person and you will find they are “angry about politics” or “gay and angry” or “conservative and angry” and a model like that really will suppress “politics” and “gay” and “conservative” (the conditional probability distribution says to do so) and more so will be accused of doing so.

The argument that almost moves me is that networks like that have the potential to enable organizing for change and that suppressing the visibility of outrage would squelch that but we are already seeing outrage-driven politics reach a point where people choose their values to fit their tribe instead of choosing a tribe that fits their values. More and more people will only vote for one party ever which leads to a “doom loop” in politics because there is no competition for “effective”, “not corrupt”, “get what you pay for with your taxes” which are in (almost) everyone’s interest. Trouble is that is the road to Lebanon, at best you have corrupt politicians stealing everything and a government that has no legitimacy because it can’t get anything done. At worst people will tear it all down.